Perception of SWE in Gaming Industry?

Feb 7, 2019 105 Comments

Have an offer for a SWE position in Microsoft Xbox group. L61, TC $180k.

I'm still quite green and wondering if this is a good move career wise.

I've read that SWE in the game industry is paid poor TC, which means poor talent and I'm concerned that will affect my career. When interviewing, almost everyone on my panel has been in the organization for >10 years, which is another bad sign. How does the larger tech community view SWEs working in the game industry?

I'm currently at Amazon but want to leave. So I have push factors.

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 TOP 105 Comments
  • Amazon
    jacksap

    Go to company page Amazon

    jacksap
    If people stay on more than ten years how is that a bad sign?
    Feb 7, 2019 15
    • Valve
      ShTW84

      Go to company page Valve

      ShTW84
      Valve, Bungie, 343 (a little bit of crunch culture there though). Not sure about ArenaNet/Pokemon/Monolith, they’re good sized but I’ve got no idea of their work culture/comp structure.
      Feb 14, 2019
    • IGT / Ops
      mr z

      Go to company page IGT Ops

       mr z
      Hmm staying in same company for long is not good anymore? I know people whom worked for 30+ years in ours, started from bottom... I'm on 8th year, but I do feel that I were trapped, made lateral move recently, gonna break out once I'm done with Masters program. But will try internal big jump first. And yeah, we deal with other "gaming"...
      Mar 8, 2019
  • IBM
    braindeath

    Go to company page IBM

    braindeath
    Same perception as a gamer gets in real life. (unless you are ninja)
    Feb 7, 2019 4
  • I don't understand. If you're working on console or building services, those skills translate to any SWE. "I've read that SWE in the game industry is paid poor TC", Xbox pays the same as the rest of the company. Your idea of SWE in gaming seems to be of game developers. Unless you're working in Studios as a game dev(where you may be paid less because that's the game dev industry), pretty much everything you said doesn't apply
    Feb 7, 2019 4
  • game programming is much harder than writing stupid react apps or whatever flavor of the month framework
    Feb 7, 2019 1
  • New / R&D
    zorkan

    New R&D

     zorkan
    My perception is that the game industry works with outdated tech stacks, but they do impressive things with what they have.

    I think overall it doesn't look great on a resume, but it doesn't have to look bad. A lot of it depends on the success of your team and the technologies you use.
    Feb 7, 2019 3
    • New / R&D
      zorkan

      New R&D

       zorkan
      I would say many game studios ignore performance optimization in favor of faster content creation pipelines (eg; Bethesda game engine is ancient, buggy, ect..). Hell some console games even have crap performance on the baseline consoles -eg; not much QA on baseline versions of ps4/Xbox one.
      Feb 8, 2019
    • Epic Games / Eng
      uSko17

      Go to company page Epic Games Eng

      PRE
      Unity Technologies
       uSko17
      Valve still uses PHP for their webstack. At Epic we lag behind a little in some areas, but are pretty cutting edge on game engine features, rendering, and also some language and scripting areas. Clearly from Fortnite we are executing scale well with infra, but there is a ton I'd like to change internally. Game servers and services are a very specialized problem
      Feb 16, 2019